A doctor, a scholar, and a meditator walk into a bar… and they’re the same person!
This (admittedly rather bad) joke flitted into my head while we sat together on a grey October day at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for the History of Medicine discussing the frequent but frequently fraught intersections of meditation, healing, and the scholarship that claims to understand these two. Continue reading The Doctor, the Scholar (and the Meditator?) in Middle Period China
This is a syndicated post by Volker Scheid that first appeared on Somatosphere.
Prologue: Pope Francis and Zhang Taiyan 章太炎
On 16 June 2015, Pope Francis published Laudato Si’ (Be Praised), an encyclical letter on climate change tellingly subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home.” The encyclical links the destruction of the environment with the exploitation of the poor, and it unambiguously roots both in capitalism’s pernicious gluttony [10]. In the Pope’s analysis, neither technoscience nor the market are capable of averting an impending ecological catastrophe. Avoiding disaster will require a full-scale reassessment of contemporary human values, a turning away from consumerism to sobriety and self-constraint.
In a single stroke that stays true to his carefully chosen regnal name, Pope Francis thereby turned himself into one of the most preeminent critics of the contemporary world order [8]. An editorial in the Guardian referred to Laudato Si’ as “the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years.” The conservative backlash, particularly in the US, was ferocious.[a] Jeb Bush, a spokesperson for the unconstrained exploitation of the environment within neoliberal economies of desire, chose the first day of his presidential campaign to point out that his being Catholic does not mean he will take his economic politics from the Pope. Rush Limbaugh referred to Pope Francis as a Marxist. Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld not only repeated this description but called Pope Francis one of the most dangerous men on the planet for wanting to be a “modern pope” – which, come to think of it, is a rather insightful analysis, though beyond the modern would perhaps be a more apt description. For by reinserting morality (or religion) into science and politics Pope Francis is seeking to bridge once more the cleavages that mark out the modern [1].
And therein lies the rub. For even as his intervention challenges the modern constitution, indeed calls it fundamentally flawed and outright dangerous, as pontiff of the church Pope Francis simultaneously represents the very institution against which modernity, at least in the West, historically struggled to emerge [6]. This history makes it difficult for the Roman Catholic church to represent an alternative to the modern that would not simply take us back to where we already have been [4]. Which is, of course, precisely the point that Jeb Bush is making when he asks the pope not to mix religion with politics.
To sidestep these objections, I want in this essay to insert Laudato Si’ into a lineage of quite different critiques of capitalism. These are largely unknown to contemporary western audiences but informed, like Pope Francis, by attempts to make religion and ethics speak to politics and science in unexpected but powerful ways [1].
In the early 20th century, exposed to the destructive forces of modern imperialist capitalism, Indian and Chinese scholars also mobilized the intellectual power of long-standing traditions of thought and practice to think through the changes that engulfed them, to locate potential means of resistance, and to imagine alternative futures [4, 9, 11]. Viewed from this other historical perspective, Laudato Si’ is a comparable contemporary response to the destructive forces of modernity, which forces were then transforming Asian ways of being and are now threatening the world more drastically than ever.
One of these thinkers, largely unknown in the West and increasingly forgotten also in China, was Zhang Binglin章炳麟 (1868-1936), commonly known by his courtesy name Taiyan太炎. Zhang Taiyan was a major intellectual figurehead of the nationalist revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911. As a scholar trained in classical Chinese modes of research, he was also the most eminent philologist of his time [6, 7, 8]. He understood that China’s problems were tied to an increasingly intrusive imperialist world order, and in response he drew on Nietzsche and Hegel, Indian logic and China’s own philosophies, to think through alternatives [4, 9]. He was a proponent of modern science but throughout his life never relinquished deep-seated attachments to Chinese medicine or Buddhist practice.[b]
By and large his modern biographers have found it impossible to come to terms with such a multi-faceted person [4]. His commitment to Chinese medicine, for instance, is written out of his life by those who champion Zhang as a hero of China’s turn towards the modern and as a critic of Western imperialism.[c] Chinese medicine practitioners and cultural conservatives, meanwhile, celebrate the same person as a champion of China’s national essence (guocui 國粹), conveniently forgetting his argument that China’s past was gone not only for good but also for good reasons [10].[d]
It is precisely this contradictory complexity that makes critics like Zhang Taiyan and Pope Francis so dangerous to moderns of any persuasion. I, too, take seriously traditions – specifically East Asian medicines – as a mode of thinking with which the contemporary should be critically engaged. Not in order to re-constitute a vanished past but in order to imagine a different future. The multi-logue developed in this essay [4] – between capitalism and the contemporary world order; Pope Francis, Zhang Taiyan and their critics; and Chinese medicine as a tradition that has much to say on desire – is, I hope, an example of the potential productiveness of this approach. It challenges the modern distinctions between bodies and minds, the individual and the social, self and non-self, politics and science not by opposing such divides with a truer, more real alternative, but by pointing to modes of grasping their productive interconnections [1, 2, 7], including those that might be established between the Pope, who one might guess still believes in a world beyond the here and now, and Chinese physicians like Zhang Taiyan, for whom that world is but a flow of ever changing constellations [7].
Needs and Wants: A Chinese medicine view from the 19th century
In the 19th century a group of Chinese medicine physicians conceptualized human physiology in ways that can help us to ground Pope Francis’ philosophy – something we can accept or reject as belief – in the very physiology of life, in something that we embody and that we therefore ignore at our own peril. What follows is a simplified view of that physiology.[e]
Life is engendered and maintained by different kinds of vitalities. In a healthy organism these vitalities check and support each other, but they are as likely to become causes of disease [3].
The first of these vitalities is what in Chinese medicine is called ‘the protective’ (wei 衛). The etymology of the term links to military forces deployed in defense of the realm [1, 2, 11]. In medical writings ‘the protective’ therefore evokes imaginaries of fierceness and mobility, of a vitality that is necessary but that is also potentially difficult to control. The sources of the protective are tied to the very conception of life. They emit from its wellspring in the ‘gate of vitality’ (mingmen 命門), also known as the ‘cinnabar field’ (dantian 丹田) in the lower abdomen, which is the focus of all the internal alchemical traditions (neidan 內丹) for ‘nourishing life’ (yangsheng 養生). From its source in the gate of vitality the protective spreads throughout the body, diffusing it with warmth, filling the body so there is no space into which anything from the outside may invade [7]. That does not mean that nothing is let in or out. Life, after all, depends on food and drink, on language and communication, on the tenderness of touch, on sweating and urination [2]. Yet, the power of the protective is such that it can transform whatever reaches us from the outside into essences (or aspects of self) from which, in turn, further protective vitalities may emerge [3].
Quite early on, Chinese physicians realized that what protects and transforms also, however, is a potential threat. For protection is a desiring, the creation of boundaries, the attempt to turn what is in the exterior into something that maintains the interior, an expansive force whose limits are potentially endless [1]. The protective is thus also the sexual power of arousal, the basis of imagination, that which may extend life beyond the present [9, 11]. When these powers are not controlled, when forces of the wild within ourselves burn freely they scorch and exhaust the essences they are meant to guard. Instead of providing immunity from what threatens from the outside they inflame the inside as forces of auto-intoxication and self-destruction [11]. Uncontrolled, our desiring vitalities threaten the centers of power in the Heart (xin 心), inflaming its imaginations and robbing it of the stillness necessary for clarity of spirit (shenming 神明) that underpins effective action [5].
The libidinal economy of the body therefore requires other vitalities, too, ones that can keep the ever expansive desiring forces within ourselves in check. There are two of these, one originating within the body/person, the other without. Within ourselves lies the ‘constructive’ (ying 營). The etymology of this term evokes the barracks or battalion headquarters in which the protective is stationed from time to time, where it is nourished but also from where it receives its orders. The constructive is thus a managing power (jingguan 經管) that succeeds in directing the protective because it is able to provide it with stable sustenance and purpose [6]. Its ability to do so is grounded in learning, memory and the ongoing construction of a supple self [11]. If the constructive fails to impose these powers, the protective lacks constraint, turning into a destructive force that will sweep through the body like a blazing fire. On the other hand, it is only because of the transforming powers of the protective wei that the constructive ying can be assimilated from food, drink, and whatever else the outside affords as nourishment [2,3,6,7,9,11].
The other check to the libidinal powers of the protective are the rhythms of society and nature that are gathered (zong宗) into ourselves [3]. This vitality is embodied most visibly in the act of breathing that connects us rhythmically with the world outside. It is a gathering also into ourselves of the rules and regulations of the clan, the lineage, and the cultures that determine the rhythms of work and play, production and reproduction: Wimbledon following Rolland Garros and preceding the US Open, or university semesters. And it is the rhythms of the natural world, too: of sleeping and waking, of the ebb and flow of the menstrual cycle, the waxing and waning of the moon, of summer following winter [6]. These rhythms gathered into ourselves interact with the protective and the constructive, setting limits to the former and guiding the latter, smoothing all impetuous rushing, turning it into a gentler and more sustainable flow [7]. Yet, the setting of limits can as easily constrain the vital flows of life, slow down the constructive or strangulate the creative forces of the protective, causing them to become pent up and turn destructively inward, or to release themselves in sudden devastating explosions of uncontrolled vital force [10].
So what?
So how does the libidinal and constructive economy known to a group of late 19th century Chinese physicians speak to the impending ecological and economic catastrophes of the 21st century addressed by Pope Francis? First, I need to make clear that its value lies not in its status as an alternative mode of knowing, though Chinese medicine (or other Asian forms of knowledge) are frequently presented (or are represented) as “other epistemologies” [8]. Rather, they speak to problems of the present – our present – precisely because they are products of a history that brought China and Chinese medicine up against some of the very same issues that Pope Francis is thinking through in his Laudato Si’ and that Zhang Taiyan thought when contemplating China becoming a modern nation.
Long before it encountered the West, culture and society in late imperial China already was engaged in a process of commercialization that depended on creating ever new appetites among an elite of bureaucrats and merchants. During the same period, the Chinese medical practitioners that treated this elite with increasing frequency diagnosed problems of an internal libidinal economy. If previously wind and cold penetrating the body from the outside had been primary pathogenic agents, now pent-up frustrations and excessive desires became ever more important [3, 10]. Pathologies of the body’s own Gate of Vitality were particularly prevalent and problematic. Excited by desire, the heating vitalities or ‘dragon fire’ (longhuo 籠火) – the protective in the language of my 19th century physicians – that was meant to protect the body/person from external invasion were perceived to turn inward, inflaming body and mind in uncontrolled forms of auto-intoxication [3].
The next generation of Chinese medicine physicians, increasingly familiar with biomedical ideas imported from the West, were quick to link the vitalities of the dragon fire with the language of immunity and its pathologies with process of inflammation and, nowadays, auto-immunity [11]. The goal, all too often, became to show that Chinese medicine, too, was modern, or, indeed, had been modern all along.
The 19th century physicians whose libidinal economy I have outlined here, however, including Zhang Taiyan, entertained a different perspective. Known collectively as the “current of convergence” (huitong xuepai 匯通學派), they imagined medicine as a field of practice sustained by the confluence of different traditions and streams of knowledge [6].[f] Zhang Taiyan, for instance, taught his students to employ certain forms of South Asian logic as a system for sharpening Chinese medical diagnostics, to learn from Japanese readings of Chinese medical classics, and to value Western scientific methods as tools if not as ends [9].[g] Through such plural practice, Zhang Taiyan challenged both traditional Chinese and modern western claims regarding the existence of a single authentic tradition with access to universally valid knowledge [8]. His Buddhist studies, moreover, led him to advocate the pursuit of an embodied transcendence that could negate world, time, and history. Yet, as his life-long involvement in medicine demonstrates, he also explored and advocated concrete effective action in pursuit of the common good. Such action is, by definition, political but, when viewed from the perspective of a physician/philosopher like Zhang Taiyan, roots a body politic in the politics of the body [4].
Which takes us back to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’. My purpose in this essay has not been to examine or critique the Pope’s analysis of the contemporary world order. Rather, by bringing it into conversation with Chinese medicine, and turning more explicitly to the body, I wish to show possibilities for intellectual flows of convergence that sidestep thinking the present merely through western philosophies and their foundational assumptions and histories, even as it ties the social to the personal, the body to the environment, and care for the self to politics at large [4, 6, 11]. From the perspective of 19th century Chinese physiology the question of how to safeguard human life is never, therefore, a choice between a ‘progressive’ turn to technology and science that must perforce accept their auto-intoxicating excesses [10] and a conservative tempering of life that promises to steer us to some pure and uncorrupted but, by implication, still and lifeless essence. Rather, these physicians would argue, life can be sustained – that is, continually nourished, renewed, managed, and made productive – only if all of our vitalities interpenetrate [4, 7]. The burning of desire is the physiological sine qua non of life. However, it is up to each of us individually and collectively whether and how such desire will be tempered through morality, learning, and the institutions that engender and transmit them. These relations are charged with tensions but precisely in this manner they generate a flow that reaches towards (tong 通) the future [7]. It is the very purpose of medicine to engage with these tensions productively. It is a matter for us to begin the process of translating – and thereby reshaping and revitalizing – these resources into tools for the present.
Volker Scheid is Professor of East Asian Medicines and Director of EASTmedicine (East Asian Sciences and Traditions in Medicine) in the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Westminster, London. He has practiced Chinese medicine for over 30 years. Out of this conjuncture, he seeks to make the humanities talk to Asian medicine, and make Asian medicines relevant to the contemporary world.
Notes
[a]. For a synopsis see Denise Robbins. 18 June 2015. Conservative Media vs. The Pope: The Worst Reactions To Pope Francis’ Climate Change Encyclical. Media Matters for America. Accessed at http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/06/18/conservative-media-vs-the-pope-the-worst-reacti/204037 on 20.10.2015.
[b] For biographies of Zhang Taiyan from a variety of perspectives see Shimada Kenji, Pioneer of the Chinese Revolution: Zhang Binglin and Confucianism, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Kauko Laitinen, Chinese Nationalism in the Late Qing Dynasty: Zhang Binglin as an Anti-Manchu Propagandist, (London: Curzon, 1990); Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan, (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
[c] See any of the biographies listed above in note 2.
[d] Hu Yue 鬍樾. ‘Zhonggui gexin daoshi Zhang Taiyan 國醫革新導師章太炎. (Zhang Taiyan: leader of national medical reform).’ Chinese Journal of Medical History 中華醫史雜志, 4 (1995). Chen Yu 陳瑜, and Xu Jingsheng 許敬生. ‘Qianlun Zhang Taiyan dui zhongyi wenxianxue zhi gongxian 簡論章太炎對中醫文獻學之貢獻 (A Synopsis of Zhang Taiyan’s contribution to Chinese medicine’s literary culture.’ Journal of Chinese Medicine Literary Culture 中醫文獻雜志, 3 2005; Duan Xiaohua 段曉華, and Chang Gongyi 暢洪昇. ‘Zhang Taiyan yixue yanjiu lichen jianche 章太炎醫學研究歷程簡析 (A brief analysis of the development of Zhang Taiyan’s medical research).’ Journal of the Jiangxi College of Chinese Medicine 江西中醫學院學報, 6 2008.
[e] The physicians on whose work I am drawing on are Zhou Xuehai 周學海, particularly his book Random Notes While Reading Medicine (Duyi suibi 讀醫隨筆), 1898 (reprinted by Jiangsu kexue jishu chubanshe, Nanjing: 1985); and Tang Rongchuan 唐容川, particularly his book Discussion of Blood Patterns (Xuezheng lun 血證論), 1884 (reprinted by Renmin weisheng chubanshe, Beijing: 1980).
[f] For a brief history of this current in relation to Chinese medical modernisation see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 1626 – 2006 (Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007), pp. 204-206.
[g] Ibid., pp. 208-211.
Guest post by Park Seung-Hyun
Bio: I am HK Research Professor at the Institute of Mind Humanities, Wonkwang University. I received my B.A. and M.A. at the Department of Philosophy, Chung-ang University in Korea, and completed my Ph.D at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University. My thesis was titled “A Study on Huainanzi and ZhuanhXue in early Han Dynasty.” I believe that the true meaning of philosophy emerges only when the essence obtained by pursuing theoretical issues is implemented in real life. In this regard, I believe that philosophical questions should be focused on how human dignity can be realized in the real world. My research interests go to the subject of philosophical counseling and healing, where the issues of human pain are dealt with in various perspectives. My working project lies at the intersection of the train theory and the subject of mind healing.
Recently, there has been burgeoning interest in healing for illnesses of the heart.1 People living in developed civilizations are burdened by heavy workloads that force them to live busy lives. As people produce more, they also consume more. It is common knowledge that in modern society, people are often treated as tools of production, and are valued for their utility rather than their being. Human dignity is determined by one’s degree of usefulness, and thereby humanity loses its true meaning.
Why do people today place such high value on material civilization to the detriment of living a happy life? Perhaps they suffer because of an incorrect interpretation of what it means to live a happy life. They seem to believe that happiness is not a matter of the heart, but instead depends on external material conditions. They strongly believe that happiness requires a certain status or social success, and to secure such a happy life, they are taught to believe that they must triumph through fierce competition to secure wealth and status. They believe that they should desperately use all means and methods to achieve such an esteemed life. However, owing to such beliefs, life can spiral downwards. Social pathologies and pain arising from misguided beliefs can only be resolved when one’s viewpoints and attitudes change.
A change in viewpoint and attitude toward life must begin by reflecting on oneself. We should reflect on our wrong belief, and attempt to distance ourselves from it. Distancing ourselves means changing our viewpoint. However, a shift in viewpoint cannot be achieved simply by way of intellectual exploration. Intellectual work, which pursues the knowledge of the objective world, is just an auxiliary means to resolving pain. Beyond this intellectual effort, we should also look at the disposition of our mind, and practice resting the mind. This is the starting point of meditation.
Meditation, in my view, is not about pursuing external objects, but a disciplined way of looking for the lost self. Meditation is an attempt to search for the origin that gives the self his or her identity. The ordinary active mind is formed by our habits and experiences, as well as by our education. In this frame of mind, we can distinguish right from wrong according to our life standards, but can always easily slip into self-centered thought and act according to our own biases. When we do this, discrepancies in opinions arise, causing disputes and contributing to a painful life. Meditation aims primarily to distance ourselves from such an ordinary, habitual mind. It further seeks to eventually find the true self.
Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism all uphold the goal of a perfected human being—represented by a saint, an immortal, or Buddha, respectively—and promise that this is a state human beings can reach through various practical disciplines taught by each tradition. From the viewpoint of all three Asian traditions, the realization of such an ideal human life lies in the search for one’s inner foundation. In all cases, discipline and practice starts with overcoming the self, specifically, with winning the fight against the selfish persona. This paper discusses how this practice appears in the Chinese Daoist classic, the Book of the Way and its Power (Daode Jing), by Laozi.
Meditation in Laozi
Laozi’s Daode Jing does not mention a specific meditation technique. However, there are hints of Laozi’s ideas about how to practice. He instructs: “Close the mouth, shut the doors. Blunt the sharpness, untie the tangles. Soften the light, become one with the dusty world. This is called profound identification.”2 This expression suggests three stages of meditative practice.
The first stage, “close the mouth and shut the doors,” is the pre-meditation stage. Although it mentions only the mouth, the implication is we must close all of our sensory organs. This closes the doors through which qi exits, and via which our life energy is wasted. If we thus sit quietly, we are not distracted by the temptation of external objects.
Laozi’s second stage of mediation is to “blunt the sharpness and untie the tangles.” This is the stage of mental discipline in which we refine the roughness of our mind. In this stage, it is important to forsake unnecessary desires that cause conflicts with others. Laozi also warns against pursuing futile knowledge. If we do so, we can be free from worries; we can empty our mind and remain serene.
In this serene condition, we can see the true nature of all things, which is the third stage. This transformation cannot come simply from philosophical thoughts, but must be achieved through a transcendental consciousness that is beyond the ordinary state of mind. That is the realm where light is softened, and one becomes one with the dusty world. This last stage of the discipline is called xuantong, “becoming one with the mysterious.”
Unfortunately, the Daode jing does not give more detail about specific methods involved in meditation. But, Laozi presents various ideas in the text about the practice and its benefits.
Laying down desires
The path of cultivation laid out by Laozi involves modesty, humbleness, and surrendering. By overcoming problematic situations caused by the bondage of the selfish self, we can heal a confused heart. Laozi sternly warns of the results of endlessly expanding material desires: “There is no greater woe in our lives than not knowing our satisfaction.”3 The more desire we have for wealth, power, and sensuous pleasure, the further we pursue them. People always seem to want to be satisfied, to stay ahead of other people, and to feel happy by pursuing sensuous desires. If we do not step away from the pursuit of these worldly values, we will not be able to attain peace of mind and a sense of balance.
In constrast, Laozi finds the true value of human life in remaining simple: “People around me are very bright, but only I seem to be dull. People around me have a calculating and careful mind, but only I remain in the dark. Quietness seems like a sea, and gusts of wind seem to run wild. People around me are all useful, but only I am uncivilized and outdated. Only I, different from others, see it important to move toward the Way.”4 It seems that, compared with others who seem to be moving at a fast pace in response to changing times, Laozi might look like a fool or outcast. However, unlike people who pursue their immediate interests in daily life, his mind is focused on the Way, which is the origin of things. This state of mind is not to be gained naturally, but must be reached through the practice of meditation.
People with Laozi’s “foolish mind” can deal with everyday situations with a flexible attitude. They will not manipulate people, and will not resort to acting immorally. They will handle work naturally. Laozi expresses such a life attitude as “soft.” He insists, “When human beings are alive, they are soft, but when they are dead, they become firm. As plants grow, they are flexible, but when they are dead, they become hard. Those things that are dead are hard and strong, and those things that are living are soft and weak.”5
Though a person who is like water might be humiliated by a strong person, hardness will always eventually be subjugated by softness. “There is nothing in the world softer than water, but when water accumulates and grows bigger it can penetrate even the hardest material. Everyone knows that something feeble can win against something strong, and something soft can win against something hard, though they do not properly practice this principle.”6
Worldly people continuously consume their lives competing with other people to attain more wealthy and honorable positions. In contrast, Laozi emphasizes that we should stay humble, yield to others, and live in a low position that is not usually favored. He says, “Rivers and seas allow all streams to flow into them because they stay low. Therefore, they can become the king of the streams.”7
Laozi believes that this concept of non-competition can help remove the roots of social injustice, and open the way to accept other people’s position. A person with a water-like mind is able to restrain him or herself from fighting with other people. Laozi says, “Water benefits all things, does not pick a fight, and yet it stays where many people disdain it. It resembles the Dao.… It avoids fighting and thus, it has no transgressions.”8 Likewise, “A saint, although seated above, does not feel like a heavy burden to people, and he, although seated in the front, is not like an obstacle to people. Therefore, all people willingly honor him, but they are not bored with him. He does not fight with other people, and so he has no enemies.”9
Thus, Laozi, through his suggested methods of being flexible, keeping a low profile, and being non-competitive, intends to open the way for each of us to restore our own nature and to allow all things to realize their own nature. Through such efforts, we can aim to step away from being bound by our immediate desires and consumption, instead cultivating a yielding and modest mind that looks for a mutually beneficial situation for everyone.
Overcoming artificiality and affectation
However, while modesty and humility are desirable, our habitual, ordinary mind easily falls into temptation and vanity. We seek to resolve our life problems in a simple way rather than in a right way.
Laozi warns against “artificial doing” (youwei, or renwei), which can also be translated as “affectation.” Laozi says in this regard, “A person, with heels up, cannot stand long; and a person, with legs spread wide, walks clumsily and cannot go far. A person, if claiming his insistence, is not bright; a person, if insisting on being right, is not bright; a person, if showing off himself, loses his meritorious achievements; and a person, if boasting of himself, will not sustain his presence long.”10 A person with heels up, a person walking clumsily, and a person showing off or boasting are people who act unnaturaly. Such acts are all deemed “redundancies from the viewpoint of the Way.”11 Vanity is an unnecessary attitude one carries with them when doing a particular act. Such vanity hampers the course of a normal life, and, in worse cases, it leads to unhealthy situations. Laozi notes the diversity of affectations in our lives driven by vanity, and asks us to escape from them.
The causes of such artificiality can be explained in three ways. The lowest level of artificiality refers to the intemperate pursuit of sensuous desires. The stronger and more diverse the stimuli received from external sources through our sensory organs, the further our consciousness is pressed by and subjected to such external stimuli, and the further disabled the mechanism to look upon ourselves becomes. Laozi says, “Five colors blind people’s eyes, five sounds deafen people’s ears, and five tastes hurt people’s mouths.”12 In other words, stimuli of all kinds dull our sensory organs, making us more and more numb. Obviously, the pursuit of temporary pleasures like these does not lead to true happiness. Furthermore, sometimes, manipulation in the pursuit of pleasures leads us directly to pain.
The second level is psychological or emotional artificiality: feelings of pleasure, anger, or numbness when showing off and employing one’s skills to gain favors from others. The third and last level is manipulation through thoughts, theories, and ideologies. These three levels—sensuous desires, vanity, and ideological distortions—all lead people to manipulate others and to lose their true nature. Such loss of nature causes them to plunge into non-freedom.
To oppose and negate the manipulations of “artificial doing” (youwei), Laozi presents the concept of “non-doing” (wuwei). For Laozi, non-doing does not simply mean inaction. Non-doing is the positive action of refusing to give rise to the factors that lead to the abovementioned manipulations. The verb wu in wuwei can mean “to negate” or “to remove.” The target of such negation are mental states like dependence, falsehood, manipulation, and externalization. Human beings, if bound in these states, will become unnatural and devoid of freedom. Thus, Laozi asserts that, in order to escape from pain and move towards freedom, these need to be negated and removed.
Non-doing is thus a training to negate and remove artificiality and affectation from the mind. It can be reached only through the course of strenuous discipline, paying attention to each moment in meditation. Only when this practical meaning of Laozi’s philosophy is properly disclosed, can the healing aspect of discipline be clearly understood.
Cultivation of a serene heart
In Laozi’s text, the goal of meditation is to produce a serene heart, through which we can escape from the bondages of life and pursue ultimate freedom. Stopping our desires and our artificial thinking is not merely to sit idle or stay in a dull state, but has the purpose of making us clearly awake and allowing our life to be guided intuitively.13
This state is described by Laozi as “empty” (xu) and “serene” (jing).14 He emphasizes one must become “wholeheartedly” empty and serene. This means concentrating our heart/mind on one thing.15 If our heart/mind is confused, we cannot achieve anything, and we will be driven by external influences and only be troubled. But, if our heart/mind remains truly empty and serene, our life is undisturbed by the movement of external objects. “Although all things around me are turbulent, I can return to serenity.”16
Laozi closes with this sentence: “If we do not know steadfastness, we will become irrational and wild.”17 This is what we always experience in our routine lives. If we are continuously agitated by external objects, we experience never-ending suffering. We need to stop this situation. If we stop, we can distance ourselves from such situations, and clearly see ways to return to the origin. Then we can regain our stability and search for a steady way of life. However, most people do not properly understand the way to a steady life, and instead are consumed by external things and become ill because of their sensuous desires.
Pursuing meditation is different from the pursuit of external knowledge. Laozi says, “Acquiring knowledge requires daily accumulation; practicing Dao requires daily reduction.”18 Acquiring knowledge can be thought of today as the main pursuits of the natural sciences, social sciences, and other empirical fields. Knowledge pursued in these arenas are obtained outside oneself. On the other hand, practicing the Dao requires the person to look within. Elevating oneself is possible not by filling but by emptying, not by the external but the internal.
Through this inner awakening, we can obtain a clear and pure mind, and discover our true nature beyond our specific environment. Nonetheless, Laozi’s pursuit of mental freedom through meditation is not to suggest we neglect our daily activities. Daoist philosophy is not simply about staying in the area of theoretical exploration. Laozi writes: “Embracing light with our heart and becoming one with the dusty world,”19 we should endeavor to purify and clarify our mind so we can apply these truths in real life. Daoist philosophical approaches thus are part of a practical system of overcoming pain and healing the heart.
Notes
References
This is a syndicated post, which originally appeared at Blog – Happy Goat Productions. View original post.
I often tell people that I started practicing Chinese medicine before it was a profession in the West, back in the early 1980’s! I never thought that it would be a vocation that could make a living, and looking back from the present, the growth has been explosive, but in many ways, not what I and others of that generation of practitioners (the first in the U.S.) thought it would be.
The profession, unfortunately called ‘acupuncture’, a modality, instead of Chinese or East Asian medicine, has been struggling in its direction forward, with many different points of view from total biomedicalization, to integrative medicine, to a return to a more ‘classical’ approach.
One of the main problems has been the precedents that were set four decades ago, in schools and licensure. With a limited base of knowledge, a lack of reliable translations of important Asian medical texts, and a lack of connection with Asian schools and authoritative physicians, the profession had to ‘grow up in public’, and figure it out as we went along. It was like building a house or apartment building without a solid foundation, so that as the building grew upwards, it became more unstable.
Without training the minds of students and new practitioners in the actual logic, methodology, language and culture of Chinese/East Asian medicine, it is human nature to fill those gaps with biomedical/’scientific’ thinking, and to seek other modalities such as Western nutrition, naturopathy, functional medicine, Western orthopedics, and supplements. Further compounding the problem is the small percentage of our profession who have been trained in or practice internal/’herbal’ medicine, apparently less than ten percent. Students also do not realize that what is called ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’ is a synthesis of the twentieth century in China designed to create a complimentary health care and college training system to Western medicine, where illnesses and treatment strategies are often correlated to Western diseases, rather than traditional categories.
So what is one answer to this conundrum? It is to reestablish the roots of the Chinese/Asian medical field, by embracing its core principles. 理論 Li lun/principle and theory are foundation of all fields and scientific endeavors, and it is the principles of Chinese medicine (yin/yang, five phases, channel theory, along with the principles of medicinals (flavor, qi, direction, combination and preparation) that must be mastered and understood in order to properly practice Chinese/Asian medicine.
Fortunately, we are now in an era where the core medical texts, the Han dynasty medical classics, are being released in definitive, clear versions with more accurate terminology. This trend began with the release in the 1990’s of the Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine, with several thousand technical terms, now available in expanded form in such iOS and Android apps as Pleco, along with many other Chinese/English dictionaries, books for learning medical Chinese, and courses. Along with the availability of studying medical Chinese language, many Western practitioners now go to China, Taiwan and Japan to study authentic forms of the medicine. In the last few years, we have seen the 傷寒論 Shang han lun, 金匱要略 Jin gui yao lue (translated by Sabine), 素問 Su wen, and soon the 靈樞 Ling shu and an updated 難經 Nan jing from Paul Unschuld.
At the same time, study programs in 古方 gu fang/’ancient prescriptions’ from such teachers as Huang Huang, Arnaud Versluys, and Suzanne Robideux are now available, along with classical acupuncture and moxabustion courses by such teachers as Lorraine Wilcox (who has translated or edited several acupuncture classics), Ed Neal, and David White.
The most recent addition to our ‘embarrassment of riches’ in English translation is Sabine Wilm’s latest work, 神農本草經 Shen nong ben cao jing/The Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica. With the publication of this work, a complete set of Han dynasty medical classics is now available for the serious student and practitioner. What is special about this translation, and text, can be summed up in the word ‘core’. It is the earliest compilation of the internal medicine tradition, including 365 herbs, minerals and animal parts divided into three categories, 上藥 shang yao/superior/upper medicinals, 中藥 zhong yao/middle-grade medicinals, and下藥 xia yao/lower (inferior) medicinals. What is quite interesting about this classification is that the medicinals that are the least 毒 du toxic/imbalanced are in the superior category, suitable for 養生 yang sheng/nourishing life, supplementing qi, blood and 精 jing/essence, and maintaining health and longevity. The middle and inferior categories contain more ‘medicinally active’ herbs that must be combined with other medicinals to balance their extremes or reduce toxicity and side effects, and are more suitable for treating illnesses. This reminds us that the vast system of Chinese/Asian medicine in its foundation is about preserving, nurturing and maintaining health, and only secondarily about treating disease. As it says in the preface to book one, ‘Upper Medicinals’, “The upper-level medicinals consist of 120 types. These function as rulers. They are in charge of nurturing 命 ming/destiny and thereby correspond to Heaven. They are non-toxic and (even) when taken in large quantities or over a long time, do not harm the person. If you want to lighten the body, boost qi, avoid aging, and extend your lifespan, root your prescriptions in the upper (section of the) Classic.” Section two discusses the fundamental rules of combining medicinals into formulas, in their mutual relationships, as “rulers, vassals, assistants, and messengers”. Section three of the preface discusses the flavors of the medicinals, harvesting, processing, delivery systems (pills, powders, decoctions) and preparation of the medicinals. The remaining sections (four through seven) cover dosages, categories of illness, and diagnostics.
Happy Goat Productions has produced this book in a physician’s desk-friendly format, compact, easy to carry and access, and with clear, readable fonts. The woodcuts and drawings that illustrate the text are a delight as well. For those of us who are practicing wild-crafters or gardeners, or ‘whose hands are constantly busy with herbs’, the simple, precise discussions of the 365 medicinals is a sheer delight, and constant inspiration.
What would I recommend for future editions? Sabine had a monumental job putting together this text, it was no walk in the park. In fact, it was often written in a cabin warmed by a wood-burning stove, in the howling frigid winds that blow down the Columbia gorge from the east in the wintertime. But I’d personally love to see commentaries on the text in an expanded edition, along with more numerous illustrations. Otherwise, this text should be on every herbalist’s desk, and would also serve as an excellent introduction to herbal medicine for acupuncture/ ’moxabustionists’ as well. I’m looking forward to taking the Shen nong ben cao jing into the forests, as I commune with the plants and minerals in the fields. Or as Zhuangzi once said, ‘cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown’.
Z’ev Rosenberg, 醫生 yi sheng,
San Diego, Ca., Spring 2016, year of the fire monkey
This post originally appeared in The Bulletin of the Xinglin Institute 2016.1.
One of the more common modern uses of Chinese medical case histories (yi’an 醫案) is pedagogical. Cases are presented to allow the student to learn how to apply the doctrines of Chinese medicine in actual clinical situations. Continue reading From Text to Case and Back Again: The Codification of Ye Gui’s Clinical Experience in “Systematic Differentiation of Warm Disease”
This is a syndicated post that first appeared at http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/research/advancements-in-research/fundamentals/in-depth/when-east-meets-west
By Catherine Gara
In 1969, Chinese researcher Youyou Tu was recruited to Chairman Mao’s top-secret Project 523 to help find a new drug to treat malaria. This October, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the lifesaving drug artemisinin in extracts of Artemisia annua L., a plant known to Chinese to have medicinal properties since at least the fourth century. Her win has brought renewed attention to the dynamic relationship between Chinese and Western medicine. At Johns Hopkins, two faculty members from very different fields are exploring that relationship in their own ways: one by studying its history, the other by figuring out how one traditional Chinese medicine works.
From Plant to Pill
While Tu found inspiration in a document hundreds of years old, Jun Liu’s nudge toward Chinese medicine was more modern: a billboard. Liu, a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences, was in China for a conference in 1993. “I walked out of my hotel, and there was this billboard advertising an extract from the thunder god vine as a novel immunosuppressant. I was already working on two immunosuppressive drugs isolated from microbes, so this piqued my interest. I went to the drugstore to buy a bottle of the extract and then read what I could find about it when I got back to my lab, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
The Chinese billboard that inspired Liu to study thunder god vine extract.Liu caught a break: Another scientist had already purified the active ingredient in thunder god vine and chemically characterized it 20 years earlier. But its mode of action was still unknown, making the compound exactly the type he likes to work on.
“We work with natural compounds that have already been purified, characterized and identified as potent against cancer or some other condition,” he explains. “Then, we figure out how they exert their biological activity.”
He says that knowing a compound’s mechanism of action facilitates its development into a good drug because compounds are often toxic or unstable, or don’t get to the organ they need to. Before tweaking a compound to try to resolve those issues, it’s best to first know which protein a compound interacts with and how. “That way, you know where you can make chemical modifications without losing biological activity,” says Liu.
Tripterygium regelii, or thunder god vineFor the compound extracted from thunder god vine, triptolide, that story is still ongoing. Most recently, Liu’s team published results showing that the compound halts cell growth by binding to the XPB protein, which is involved in manufacturing RNA and repairing damages to DNA. Derivatives of triptolide are already in use in the clinic, but Liu thinks there’s room for improvement. “Right now, we think of triptolide as the explosives you pack into a missile. It’s too toxic to be let loose,” he says. “So we’re engineering a ‘missile head’ for it, to direct it solely to cancer cells. We should know in a few years’ time if it works.” If it does, traditional Chinese medicine will have provided another successful lead for Western medicine.
More Than a Second Language
The history of Chinese medicine and its relationship with Western medicine are some of the topics of Marta Hanson’s work. Now an associate professor of the history of medicine, she first encountered Chinese medicine as a teenager in the late 1970s when she started studying Chinese in high school and took a course in acupuncture. Puzzled that her acupuncture teacher knew no Chinese, she set out to read Chinese medical texts in their original language. She now studies those original texts in their historical contexts to better understand their history on their own terms as well as interactions between Western and Chinese medicine. “To understand our present, we need to know where it came from,” she explains. “I study the history of Chinese medicine not to extract something clinically useful, but to learn how and why things change over time.”
Hanson says Western and Chinese medicine met in the early 1600s when Jesuit missionaries arrived in China and began translating Western distillation techniques and anatomy texts into Chinese. Over time, Western influence led to the formalization of Chinese medicine, arguably culminating in Chairman Mao’s creation of integrated academic and medical institutions, like the one where Tu did her Nobel work.
Artemisia annuaHanson calls researchers like Liu and Tu “medically bilingual.” “The two systems of medicine are often mutually incommensurable, so you have to know a lot more than just an extra language to be able to blend them together in a meaningful way,” she says.
According to Liu, even the meaning of “traditional Chinese medicine” is hotly debated, but it generally involves three components: herbal concoctions, acupuncture and the concept of “chi,” or vital “energy-matter.” Some call it nonsense because they claim that it has no grounding in quantitative science and randomized clinical trials, despite decades of scientific research on various aspects of its therapies. Others, like Hanson, claim it has not only historical value but also value as a treasure house of empirical knowledge—with caveats. “Chinese medical therapies wouldn’t be in demand around the world if they did not meet the needs of patients who either culturally feel more comfortable with them or are dissatisfied with what Western medicine is able to provide,” she says.
She thinks of traditional Chinese medicine as a mirror that reflects back to modern biomedicine not its full image in reverse, but its shortcomings. And the reverse can be said about modern biomedicine as a mirror on traditional Chinese medicine’s limitations. Namely, what biomedicine is good at—evidence-based medicine, targeted treatments, modern pharmaceuticals—traditional Chinese medicine has to work on; and what traditional Chinese medicine is good at—considering the whole patient, individualized treatment, natural remedies—modern biomedicine could work on. “I think we can learn from that mirror to better understand both systems and hopefully improve them in the process,” she says.
Content previously published in Journal of Daoist Studies, 3, 2010.
Posted with permission from the editor of the Journal of Daoist Studies
ELENA VALUSSI, Loyola University Chicago
This article examines the following eight publications on women’s qigong techniques:
Videos
Chia, Mantak, 1998. Slaying the Red Dragon.
Lee, Daisy. n.d. Radiant Lotus: Qigong for Women.
Liu, Yafei. n.d. Nüzi qigong (Chinese/German).
Books
Chia, Mantak. 2005 [1986]. Healing Love through the Dao: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy. Destiny Books.
Davis, Deborah. 2008. Women’s Qigong for Health and Longevity: A Practical Guide for Women Forty and Over. Shambhala.
Ferraro, Dominique. 2000. Qigong for Women: Low-impact Exercises for Enhancing Energy and Toning the Body. Healing Arts Press.
Johnson, Yangling Lee. 2001. A Woman’s Qigong Guide: Empowerment through Movement, Diet and Herbs. YMAA Publication Center.
Zhang, Tinna Chunna, 2008. Earth Qigong for Women: Awaken Your Inner Healing Power. Blue Snake Books.
Female meditation techniques in China
The point of departure for this article is my research on female meditation techniques in China, also called nüdan 女丹, of female alchemy. Over the last few years, I have described the historical emergence of the nüdan tradition and its Chinese development both in my dissertation and several articles (see Valussi 2003; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009). Simply put, female alchemy is a textual tradition of Daoist meditation and physiological exercises for women, which emerged in China in the seventeenth century and developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is part and parcel of the much older tradition of internal alchemy (neidan 內丹), which advocates the possibility to achieve immortality through the progressive refinement of the body, aided by meditation, breathing, visualization, and massage exercises. Unlike neidan, though, nüdan followers adapt theory, practice, and language specifically to the female body.
My research reviewed most of the historical literature available in Chinese on meditation techniques for women, as well as contemporary publications on female meditation techniques in Chinese and English. When talking about contemporary publications on the topic, while Chinese publications are mostly a contemporary rendition of historical texts, those in Western languages and especially in English reveal a vast contemporary market of healing, spiritual, and meditative techniques for women inspired by Chinese traditions. For the purposes of this paper, I chose to concentrate on American publications simply because I am more familiar with them, but I am aware that these techniques have reached Western audiences outside of the U.S., and one of the items on my list was produced in Germany (Liu Yafei video).
Historical Context
Historically, nüdan texts were produced within the Daoist tradition, mostly during sessions of spirit-writing, a form of communication between gods and the community of believers, starting in the seventeenth century. They were religious texts, guiding practitioners to immortality and ascension into heaven. This is definitely not the context in which these techniques are described, taught, and performed in the United States. Their aim, rather than complete transcendence, is health and well-being. Even though there is often, but not always, a clear spiritual component in these publications, it is seen as yet another way to help the healing process.
Offerings available on the American market are wide and varied. In some instances, language and techniques are quite similar to what is found in historical nüdan texts; in others the practices seem to have no link whatsoever with that tradition. Some contemporary publications have a strong focus on sexuality and its importance in the physical and spiritual well-being of practitioners: this is not present in nüdan works and generally uncommon in the neidan tradition. Yet despite the variety, I found that nüdan techniques and language are widely used and appropriated in Western publications. It is also useful to mention that most of the neidan techniques of old are now referred, both in China and in the West, as qigong, a more modern term that is less linked to a religious milieu and favors a health-scientific background.
The mysticism surrounding the techniques and the oral transmission between master and disciple of Daoist techniques, common in Daoist communities in traditional China until the late Ming dynasty, started to dissipate in the Qing when practices became available more widely to a larger market through cheap publications and open transmissions. Secrecy almost ceased in the 1930s, when inner alchemy transformed from a religious to a lay practice and its techniques became a political tool of nation strengthening. In the Republican period, intellectuals reformulated and reorganized alchemical knowledge in order to renew the Chinese heritage, which they thought needed reviving in the face of Western cultural and political onslaught as well as of the Japanese invasion. This effort was intended to help national strengthening and progress.
Under Communist rule after 1949, traditional techniques were not discarded but made even more accessible and public. Already in the 1940s Communists formulated a conscious policy for the “Liberated Areas” to make use of local medical resources within a “scientific orientation.” Mao called on modern-trained doctors to unite with traditional therapists who were closer to the people, encouraging them to “help them to reform” (Palmer 2007, 29). Accordingly traditional neidan techniques were “reformed” to meet contemporary “scientific” standards. Liu Guizhen, a local Communist cadre, who brought these practices to the Party’s attention, spearheaded this transformation from neidan to more “modern” and “scientific” practices, which eventually lead to the creation of qigong. Together with a group of other cadres, Liu “set to work on the task of extracting the method from its religious and ‘superstitious’ setting. The method was compared with techniques described in classical medical texts, its concepts and were reformulated, and its mantras ‘reformed’ (Palmer 2007, 31).
During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, qigong fell out of favor. It was rediscovered in the 1980s, the time of “qigong fever,” then made its way to the West both through Chinese and Western practitioners. The latter incorporated it in regimens that fit Western healing styles, some with more spiritual accents, others purely health regimens, others again with sexual overtones, and many marketed as forms of “spiritual healing”.
Much work has been done in the intersection between religion and healing; in the West the category of “spiritual healing” has widened to encompass many techniques that might at one point have been connected with specific religious traditions but that are now used in separation from their original religious context to heal a variety of ailments (see Cohen 2002-03). In the specific case of Chinese spiritual healing and qigong, too, some powerful studies have appeared, detailing the specificity of Chinese conceptions of the body and healing, as well as the political implications of the practice of qigong in China (e.g., Ots 1994; Chen 2003). There are also some studies on the transfer of knowledge to the West, notably in the field of acupuncture. Linda Barnes, in her 1998 article on the Western adoption of Chinese healing techniques and especially acupuncture, argues that “this indigenization of Chinese practices is a complex synthesis which can be described as simultaneously medical, psychotherapeutic, and religious” (1996, 1). She describes a process of acculturization that is at first uncritical, then becomes more and more inquisitive: “Initially, there was a tendency among the non-Chinese to adopt these teachings uncritically. Over time, however, they began to look for sources and methods through which to articulate questions, which, in some instances, they themselves had introduced into the Chinese practices” (1998, 415).
The process of questioning that acupuncture has undergone over the past three decades has yet to happen for qigong practices, especially those dedicated to women. Only now do critical views of some practices and the questioning of sources appear in American qigong circles. Where do the practices come from? What is the affiliation of the people who teach and write about them?
In many ways the traditional secrecy that had clouded the transmission of neidan and also qigong in China has been more accentuated with their transfer to Western practitioners. Books often describe the origins of practices as often shrouded in mystery or too ancient to be verifiable. This is entirely unnecessary. Both Chinese and Western scholars outline the historical development of neidan as well as qigong traditions, schools, and techniques (see Kohn and Wang 2009). For the modern period, especially the works of Xun Liu (2009) David Palmer (2006) and Nancy Chen (2003) trace the birth and growth of neidan and qigong during the Republican era and under Communism as a mixture of inner alchemical techniques and Western medicine. For the pre-modern period, many more monographs, articles and books are now available. At this stage Western practitioners should take these studies into consideration instead of describing the Chinese tradition as an ahistorical continuum that contains all techniques, schools, and teachers. The various presentations of women’s qigong discussed below would have greatly benefited from such consideration.
Nüzi Qigong
This DVD is by the physician and qigong teacher Liu Yafei, the daughter of Liu Guizhen, the cadre responsible for the transition from neidan to qigong. Liu Yafei works at the Beidaihe sanatorium in northern China founded by her father and teaches widely abroad, mainly in Europe, but has not yet published Western language books on her practice. In her DVD and classes she keeps the practice firmly within the realm of medicine and healing, downplaying any spiritual or religious elements. This stance is partly related to the transformation that alchemical techniques underwent during the Republican and Communist periods, and partly due to the fact that her father had been harshly criticized for his involvement in the development of qigong. The repression of the Falungong religion and various qigong forms in China today, and the limits of religious expression also play a role.
Still, there are obvious similarities in Liu’s terminology and traditional nüdan texts, starting with the cosmological positioning and defining of men and women. “Men are strong and refine their qi, women are soft and refine their blood. Women have inner soft beauty. Men are high mountains, women are flowing water.” Both practices pay specific attention to the breasts, and especially to the point between them, historically considered the starting point for female practice and the activating point for women. Both also include extensive and repeated breast massages. In addition, they pay attention to the lower abdomen, and to the Meeting Yin (huiyin) point at the perineum. All of these points are located on an extraordinary vessel (Renmai, Dumai, Chongmai, or Daimai). According to Liu, they are essential for female health because they cross the front part of the body and intersect on the abdomen. She thus applies nüdan knowledge to Chinese medical readings of the body.
Another element essential in both practices is blood. However, whereas nüdan sees blood as a pool of energy to be transformed, nüzi qigong supports its normal function. The exercises accordingly serve to regulate menstruation and female hormones, to eliminate breast problems like cysts, to help in recovery after breast cancer as well as during pregnancy and menopause, and generally to maintain and improve the blood and energy flow in the body.
Not all of nüzi qigong derives from nüdan, though. Many elements also come from neiyang gong, internal nourishing, the other form of qigong Liu teaches. Her language in all cases is eminently biomedical, speaking of different health problems and of how this practice can help solve them. The questions asked by the practitioners during classes are equally focused on health and healing. No mention is made of a spiritual or religious dimension of this practice.
Radiant Lotus
Daisy Lee is a qigong instructor certified by the National Qigong Association. The DVD, after showing a class of her students performing a series of exercises specific to female health, contains an interview on her practice. Lee notes that Radiant Lotus is designed specifically for women and addresses health issues unique to women like perimenopause, menopause, hot flashes, painful periods, low back pain, swollen ankles, intense emotions, as well as uterine and breast tumors. This is achieved through a series of movements, divided into four routines, all featured on the DVD: 1. Shaking and cupping 2. Self-massage (of breasts and reproductive organs) 2. Vibrational sound healing 4. Kwan Yin closing.
The first series of movements starts by tapping the center of the chest. Lee describes this center biomedically as the thymus gland. Nüdan texts call it the “milk stream” (ruxi) and name it as the starting point of practice and as one of the main locations where the practice returns. The next movements include cupping the breasts, the neck, face, and abdomen, as well as the legs; special attention is given to breasts and ovaries, echoing nüdan materials. The second section describes a massage routine which includes, among others: ovarian, abdominal, groin, vaginal, kidneys, and breasts. All these areas are essential in nüdan practice. The movements, moreover, are performed nine times, which is also the typical number of repetitions in the nüdan tradition.
Daisy Lee uses biomedical language (thymus gland, ovaries, perimenopause, etc.) to talk about the locations as well as the effects of the practice, and she does not dwell on spiritual effects. However, the fact that she uses Tibetan vibrational sound healing as well as the Kwan Yin (Guanyin) closing, reflects the fact that spiritual practices have been integrated into a health routine. She does not say who developed the “Radiant Lotus” method nor does she discuss the mixing of Daoist (nüdan), Chinese Buddhist (Guanyin) and Tibetan Buddhist (sound healing) elements.
Both Lee and Liu Yafei speak of women’s yin nature and define it in a similar way to nüdan manuals, as soft, flowing, and internally beautiful. Both note that this nature may be more attuned to natural processes and therefore be better suited to accomplish a qigong routine. “There is a natural flow in a women’s body that helps in how you move in qigong. …you find that women are more naturally drawn to qigong” (Lee, Intro.). This is, not surprisingly, what nüdan texts already say, albeit in different terms, in the eighteenth century.
However, while Lee sees this as “a place of empowerment for women,” traditional texts use the “special predisposition of women” to maintain a woman’s place in society: in the home and away from the public eye; not a place of empowerment but a reiteration of the status quo. Both Liu Yafei’s and Daisy Lee’s instructional DVDs repeat many exercises and focus on locations featured in nüdan texts yet do not resemble each other very much. Both techniques, it appears, have a similar source, but have been refined and influenced by other traditions.
Mantak Chia
Mantak Chia was one of the first practitioners to bring neidan, or inner alchemy, to America in the 1970s. Since then, he has trained many Western practitioners to becoming full instructors while also publishing—in close cooperation with Michael Winn—a series of books that have strongly influenced the field of spiritual healing. Chia’s teachings have had a large impact on how Chinese healing and spiritual techniques are understood and adapted in the West. This is how he is described on many online sites selling his books:
A student of several Taoist masters, Mantak Chia founded the Universal Healing Tao System in 1979 and has taught and certified tens of thousands of students and instructors from all over the world. He is the director of the Tao Garden Integrative Medicine Health Spa and Resort training center in northern Thailand and the author of 31 books, including Fusion of the Five Elements, Cosmic Fusion, and the bestselling The Multi-Orgasmic Man.
In his many publications, Chia talks about inner alchemy and about the spiritual goals of the practice. His “Fusion of the Eight Psychic Channels: Opening and Sealing the Energy Body” describes the practice: “Advanced Inner Alchemy exercises that promote the free flow of energy throughout the body in preparation for the Practice of the Immortal Tao.” He credits several teachers for his knowledge of neidan practices, among whom Yi Yun “One Cloud Hermit” from Lone White Mountain, Cheng Yaolun and Pan Yu. However he does not give detailed explanation of their histories or of how the transmission of their knowledge (oral or written) to him took place. He does mention, however, that these teachers were already mixing elements from Daoism , Buddhism and Thai boxing in their teaching. To this knowledge, he added intensive study of Western medicine and anatomy.
Thus, while Chia’s publications make full use of the neidan ideology both in terminology and in the sequence of the practice, he also employs biomedical language. For example, ”When fully developed, the pineal gland becomes the compass that guides the spirit to the primeval Tao” (2005, 116). Differently from traditional neidan and nüdan manuals, he provides a profusion of details about the physical practices with many diagrams of the body, and especially of the genital area, and explains both practices and expected physical reactions in Western medical terms. Yet, he still describes the results in terms of transcendence, spirituality, and spiritual union. Thus Chia successfully maintains the esoteric nature and appeal of neidan while explaining its efficacy in a way that appeals to a Western audience.
In his Healing Love through the Tao (2005) on female practice, the technical language and description of the female body present several similarities to nüdan, starting with his use of language and the importance given to specific body locations: breasts and breast massages, ovaries, Governing and Conception Vessels (Dumai and Renmai)—all essential to female energy. He also presents an extensive discussion of sexual feelings; here is where his work differs significantly from traditional nüdan as well as from Liu Yafei’s and Daisy Lee’s modern take. Chia’s goal is to teach how to develop a better sexual relationship with a male partner through the strengthening of internal energy. Nüdan teachings, in contrast, acknowledge the emergence of sexual feelings during the practice, but teach the practitioner (who does not practice jointly with a partner) how not to dwell on them but sublimate them.
Last but not least, traditional nüdan texts talk at length about the practice of “Slaying the Red Dragon,” a technique of breast massage and internal visualization that results in the gradual disappearance of the menses. This is definitely not the message in Chia’s book.
“Slaying the Red Dragon” is the title of Chia’s video where , together with his wife Maneewan and one of their female practitioners, he describes their specific version of female practice. Despite the title, which is a clear reference to the traditional nüdan practice of eliminating the menstrual flow, the video does not discuss the disappearance of the menses. Instead, it focuses on “a Taoist way to control menstruation” attained through the strengthening of female sexual power with specific techniques like meditation, breast massage, vaginal massage, and the strengthening of the perineal muscles with external devices. In other words, the video pairs visualization techniques and breast massages from traditional nüdan, with sexual techniques that were never part of this traditionally solo technique to form an entirely new way of female sexual empowerment. Throughout video and book, Chia maintains a good balance between spirituality, sexuality, and health. The work remains a point of reference for all later books on neidan, qigong, and sexual health by other practitioners, providing a strong focus on exercises for pelvic floor health, ovarian and breast massage, and female sexual health. His work differs from other recent books on female qigong, which all give sound exercises for the female body—some for specific illnesses, others for specific life phases— in that the latter have few spiritual overtones.
Earth Qigong for Women
Tina Zhang starts her book in this way: “Earth Qigong is based on a special medical qigong developed and perfected over the course of 1,700 years by Daoists, Traditional Chinese medicine doctors, and qigong experts in China to address the needs of a woman’s unique anatomy” (2008, ix). She thereby equalizes Daoists, Chinese medical doctors, and qigong practitioners, mixing traditions and time periods into one unquestioned bundle. The term “Earth Qigong” and the Chinese subtitle to the book “Kungong”, which can be translated as “feminine practice,” are not explained. However, Zhang gives a general survey of the development of qigong and healing techniques in China, then focuses specifically on techniques for women. She says :
“This qigong program is designed to provide more movement than other qigong sets, some of which are based on seated meditation and do very little in motion. The basic goal of this program is to help women combat stiffness and the sedentary life that’s become too common. Its gentle approach helps women relax. Within this practice the deeper qi work will give positive energy to women, because it has the cultivation of the female center of qi as its main goal.” (2008, 48)
Zhang offers an apparently effective and comprehensive series of practices for women, called “The Earth Energy: Cultivating Female Energy,” “Creating Pelvic Health and Helping the Liver,” and “The Spirit of Vitality: Bringing out the Real Female Spirit.” These series focus on the pelvic area and on solving problems related to menstruation, breast swelling, and pre- and post-partum complications. Her sequences combine different styles of qigong while focusing on areas of specific female interest. She also discusses the importance of acupoints for women’s health, notably Meeting Yin at the perineum, Ocean of Qi (qihai) under the umbilicus, and Gate of Life (mingmen) between the kidneys in the back. She notes:
“Earth qigong includes several qi movements that exercise or massage the internal and external organs of the female body, some of which are not addressed in most other qigong routines or forms. These movement purposely move the blood and cultivate more of the female energy that women naturally have in their bodies in order to gain more inner power to ease and arrest uncomfortable symptoms during the different stages of menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause.” (2008, 49). Zhang’s book betrays a deep knowledge of female physiology and offers good practical advice, but lacks historical perspective.
Women’s qigong For Health and Longevity
This book by Deborah Davis addresses women over forty and divides into sections according to age (40 to 49; 50 to 64; 65 and over). It, too, focuses on specifically female concerns like pre-menstrual syndrome, breast-health, depression, menopause, insomnia, osteoporisis, heart health, and sexual issues. Davis combines her extensive knowledge of both qigong and women’s health to produce a manual of general qigong exercises that are beneficial to a woman’s body. Unlike both traditional nüdan, Liu’s nüzi qigong and Chia’s guidelines, her practices focus less on specifically “female” areas of the body and instead devote practices to whole-body health. Still, even Davis acknowledges that the “Uterine Palace” (zigong) is fundamental in the female body, and has exercises called “Soothing the Middle”, “Renmai Massage” and “Pelvic Floor Lift” that focus on the middle of the body.
Qigong for Women
Dominique Ferraro, like Deborah Davis, uses her extensive knowledge of qigong and Chinese healing techniques, including her profound understanding of acupuncture, and applies it to the female body. The last two chapters of her book are devoted to “Qigong and Sexuality” and “Common Physical Problems of Women.” The chapter on sexuality introduces the concept of a healthy sexuality between men and women, recalling the tradition of Chinese sexual manuals; it refers directly to Mantak Chia’s work, then notes the importance of blood and its proper flow. The chapter on common ailments concentrates on bones, joints, teeth, memory, and hearing; only at the end does it turn to more specific gynecological problems and pregnancy. Again, this is a good manual for general health, but the advice is often not specific to women. As Davis’s work, her book is eminently interested in physical sequences and effects.
A Woman’s Qigong Guide
This book by Yangling Lee Johnson (2001), as noted in the title, is not only about qigong but also about movement, diet, and herbs—albeit within the Chinese tradition. It provides a fairly long historical introduction about the development of Chinese medicine and qigong. The introduction also includes a personal perspective, and Johnson shares her story of self-healing during the Cultural Revolution and the hardship she underwent when relocating to the U.S.
Unlike other books of this kind, this work does not consist largely of detailed descriptions of practice postures. Only in Chapter 5 does Johnson begin to talk about “short forms,” i.e., quick postures to do in the morning, in the car, at work, outside, etc. These quick forms deal with problems such as sterility, depression, weight loss, the flu, amenorrhea, and the like. Johnson’s book contains various passages she herself translates from Daoist and Chinese medical texts, scattering advice about almost everything: alcohol intake, work, nails, sexual activity, sleeping, sweating, dieting, and more. The book concentrate on the physiology of women or on specific areas of the female body. In sum, it is not quite a qigong guide for women as advertised in the title, but rather a general guide on wellbeing for women that mixes psychological, dietary, and energetic advice.
Conclusion
In sum, I find that the field of women’s qigong publications in Western Languages is developing fast, and at the same time has a lot of room to grow. Some of the above publications are just beginning to discuss what it means to practice neidan and qigong as a woman, what are the important areas to concentrate on, and where the practice should take us. In most of the publications reviewed, there is particular attention to female physiology and to ailments that are specific to women, and there are a variety of techniques offered to relieve them. Some concentrate on health, other on sexuality, others again mix healing, sexuality and spirituality. Some are more thorough than others, but all of them, to a certain extent, lack historical perspective. Though I realize that not all are meant to include historical introductions to the field, paying attention to the historical significance and development of a tradition, as well as describing one’s affiliations with contemporary masters, and one’s place in that tradition, puts the physical practice in a clearer context. My interest in this review was to highlight the appropriation and adaptation of a Chinese tradition with roots in a religious practice. Pointedly, most if not all of the above publications do not portray women’s practices in any way as religious.
References
Barnes, Linda. 1998. “The psychologyzing of Chinese Healing Practices in the United States”, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 22: 413–443
Chen, Nancy N. 2003. Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cohen, Michael. 2002-03. “Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion: Regulating Potential Abuse of Authority by Spiritual Healers.” Journal of Law and Religion, 18.2
Kohn, Livia, and Robin R. Wang. 2009. Internal Alchemy: Self, Society, and the Quest for Immortality. Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press.
Ots, Thomas. 1994. “The Silenced Body—the Expressive Leib: On the Dialictic of Mind and Life in Chinese Cathartic Healing.” In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, edited by Thomas J. Csordas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, David. 2007. Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Valussi, Elena. 2003. “Beheading the Red Dragon: A History of Female Inner Alchemy in China.” Ph. D. Diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London.
Valussi, Elena. 2008a. “Female Alchemy and Paratext: How to Read Nüdan in a Historical Context.” Asia Major 21.2.
Valussi, Elena. 2008b. “Blood, Tigers, Dragons. The Physiology of Transcendence for Women.” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 4.1.
Valussi, Elena. 2008c. “Men and Women in He Longxiang’s Nüdan hebian (Collection of Female Alchemy).” Nannü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 10.2.
Valussi, Elena. 2009. “Female Alchemy: An Introduction.” In Internal Alchemy: Self, Society, and the Quest for Immortality, edited by Livia Kohn and Robin R. Wang, 142-64. Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press.
Winn, Micheal, 2009. “Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West”. In Internal Alchemy: Self, Society, and the Quest for Immortality, edited by Livia Kohn and Robin R. Wang, 142-64. Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press.
Xun, Liu, 2009, Daoist Modern; Innovation, Lay Practice and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press
The following is a syndicated post that first appeared at http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/12/03/wrapped-in-flesh-views-of-the-body-in-east-asian-medicine/ See the original post for the images from the NLM collection that accompany the article.
How do you assess the state of a broken bone when you can’t directly see it? Writing in 1808, Chinese doctor Qian Xiuchang discussed a problem shared by healers world-wide prior to the X-ray age: “When someone has a dislocated or fractured bone, the bone and joint are wrapped in flesh. Looking at it from the exterior, it is hard to get a clear understanding, and there is the danger of making an error.” To improve the state of bonesetting knowledge, Qian compiled Supplemented Essentials on Medicine for Injuries (Shangke buyao). That book can be found in the collection of the National Library of Medicine and is now accessible online.
An innovative feature of Qian’s text is that it includes two drawings of the human skeleton, shown from the front and the back. Chinese medical texts had long included written descriptions of the body’s “bones” (gu), a term that included individual bones as well as palpable bony landmarks. These were particularly important in acupuncture, where practitioners used them as reference points to locate the spots where needles could be inserted. Some acupuncture diagrams also outlined the positions of major bones. However, prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese texts on therapeutic medicine did not contain diagrams of the full skeleton. In 1742, when the Imperial Medical Academy compiled a textbook on bonesetting, the illustrations only indicated the position of bones by labels on the outside of human figures. In 1770, however, the Qing imperial government promulgated a set of official inquest forms in order to standardize forensic investigations on skeletal remains. It was these forensic diagrams of the skeleton that Qian Xiuchang borrowed and reproduced in his work on treating injuries, so that readers could more easily learn the forms of bones hidden beneath the skin.
Qian Xiuchang, a native of Shanghai, had received some degree of classical education and he had presumably once aspired to success in the civil service examinations that defined members of the Chinese socio-political elite. He became interested in injury medicine after he broke his leg. He apprenticed with the doctor who cured him and eventually became successful enough to attract disciples of his own. Seven of them helped to collate his Supplemented Essentials, which discussed a wide range of traumatic injuries caused by weapons, blows, and falls. It also featured a laudatory preface from Su Chang’a, a former Shanghai magistrate who became a supporter after Qian saved the life of a prisoner who had attempted suicide.
It was an era when the Chinese were critically re-evaluating received teachings, including those on medicine. At the time that Qian’s text was printed, another doctor, Hu Tingguang, was completing his own manuscript on injury medicine and also incorporated forensic diagrams of the skeleton. Both books sought to address the shortcomings of the imperial bonesetting manual. Besides using forensic medicine—and diagrams of the human skeleton—to improve their readers’ knowledge of the bones, they also incorporated forensic teachings on “mortal points,” namely spots on the body where injuries were particularly dangerous.
Qian’s Supplemented Essentials thus leads us to consider an understudied aspect of East Asian medical history: how doctors investigated and understood the body’s material structures and components. The present-day view is that “traditional Chinese medicine” is primarily interested in the body’s energies and vital functions and not in anatomy or body structures. Historically, however, that was not precisely the case. East Asian healers argued about how to define the parts of the body and their relation to health, injury, and disease, and like Qian Xiuchang, pursued different methods for improving their knowledge of the body: textual study and introspection, the dissection and observation of corpses, careful observation of healthy and diseased people.
These issues took center stage at an extraordinary workshop. Held October 2-4, 2015 at the University of Michigan, Comparative perspectives on body materiality and structure in the history of Sinitic and East Asian medicinesbrought together an international group of scholars (including historian Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine) to discuss medical portrayals and practices of the body, from the first century A.D. to the nineteenth, in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Mongol Empire, and Tibet.
The workshop explored a number of questions. How did different representations of the body co-exist with each other within a given cultural context? The anatomical images and descriptions in Tibetan medical treatises, for example, included those based on examination of corpses as well as those elaborating humoral and vitalistic beliefs and those metaphorically comparing the body’s components to a palace or to a kingdom’s rulers and ministers . Different body views were linked to different explanations for how and why illness afflicted the body, and to different therapeutic methods.
Competing images of the internal organs circulated in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and were the subject of debates about how internal structures were connected to each other and to imagined centers of primordial vitality.
The conference also explored the status and value assigned to medical illustration compared to textual descriptions of the body, and how visual conventions from various realms of medicine influenced each other. In early nineteenth-century Japan, for example, both the bonesetting expert Kako Ryōgen (1810) and the surgeon Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835) employed images in which the body’s flesh was transparent or invisible. Finally, the conference highlighted the historical importance of surgery, bone setting, and other manual therapies that required healers to physically manipulate the body’s components.
The rich diversity of presentations, the wealth of ideas and material, and the lively discussions that ensued, showed the creative vigor of contemporary scholarship on East Asian medicine, enormously facilitated by the increasing number of rare books and manuscripts that have been digitized by the National Library of Medicine and other libraries and made accessible online for researchers throughout the world.
The genre of medical cases (yi’an 醫案) did not become widespread in China until the Ming (1368-1644), but medical cases were recorded long before. Continue reading The Hermeneutics of a Song Dynasty Case Record
This is syndicated content that first appeared at http://english.caixin.com/2015-10-27/100866939.html. It has been reproduced here with permission from Marta Hanson. Continue reading Views: Renewing a Feverish Debate
